My one-hundred-and-sixty-fourth podcast is up. When's Silverlight 10 coming out? These versions are moving pretty fast. Scott chats with Tim Heuer to try and make sense of it. How does offline for Silverlight work? What's the best way to keep on the this new tech.

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As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

A very interesting talk indeed. The new offline functionality in silverlight 3 is exactly what I have been looking for. Currently redeveloping our website to use this. In our case, we wanted something that could be used online predominantly, but also offline as needed. The website helps provide exercise information for people with spinal cord injuries, stroke etc (with the ability to search etc). The one thing people kept telling us, was they would like to be able to use it on their laptops even if there is no internet access, not to mention using it in countries with poor internet access like Africa. Local storage and the ability to stream zip files to the client make for some pretty impressive features that we can add. So well done guys.

Scott, you really nailed it when you brought up that people not wanting to 'messing with products in beta' when it may break what they have at the time -- that and the large installation requirements for just trying out Silverlight is a big turn-off.

I'm sure most of us want to try out these new technologies, but at the same time we have work to do -- we can't lose productivity in order to see what might make our lives easier. The more that rests on the shoulders of VS, the less I think I'm going to try it out. VS just makes up too much of my day!

webdev)hb: There really is only one install requirement for Silverlight (VS2008). After that it is one installer. I think the difficulty becomes when people are on the edge of everything beta (i.e., Silveright 3, etc.). The teams always try to think of better ways around this like providing dev Virtual PCs, etc. but sometime we get caught up in long process-beaurocratic junk. So there is a balance of getting things out early versus getting things out with a bunch of other options. I feel most pains with people wanting to try out SL3 beta but can't 'destroy' their SL2 dev machine environment. Here a VPC is the way to go if you can.

There are other tools that some community folks have created for Silverlight/WPF development, like KaXaml...but in the end, VS will still be the best of breed for full developer goodness in my opinion. One thing to note is that the Web Platform Installer makes it easier to not have to *find* things and you can just select what you need/want (VS, Silverlight tools) and it downloads and installs for you.

Tim:That was a great podcast. I felt myself "less lonely" when i hearded that the async calls needed in Sl are one of the biggest problems among developers (specially to windows forms guys like me). I also support the idea that Sl has to run in a sandbox with no access to printers, scanners or whatever. If i need that kind of access then i´ll go to wpf/clickonce, or eventually to a local WCF service, knowing the price in installations i have to pay. If i have to ask for something, that will be more and better LOB controls inside SL runtime so that i can avoid the use of external libraries that make the xap files fatter. As a software provider, the SL scenario is nearly fantastic from the product quality and the business opportunities points of view. Please excuse my poor english, keep going and thank you!

Horacio Diez

Horaciox

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.